Italian literature: the best writers and works. Italian literature in the 20th century

Italian literature inXX century

Italian literature plays a prominent role in the pan-European literary process of the 20th century. The contribution of advanced Italian literature and art over the past quarter of a century is especially significant: the Italian artistic genius is represented in modern world culture by such names as writers Alberto Moravia and Vasco Pratolini, playwright Eduardo de Filippo, artist Renato Guttuso, sculptor Giacomo Manzu, film directors Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and others.

However, during the 20th century place of Italian literature in the general panorama Western European literatures has changed significantly. The ups and downs of Italian literary process were in close connection with those social historical events that determined the common destinies of Italy.

There is reason to establish the following periodization of Italian literature of the 20th century: from the beginning of the 900s to the Great October Revolution and the end of the First World War; 1918-1922; the period of the "black twenty years" of fascism (1922-1943); the era of the Resistance and the first post-war fifteen years; 60s of XX century.

Ways of advanced Italian literature in the first half of the 20th century. were difficult. Long before the First World War, Italian prose and poetry began to experience the symptoms of a crisis. Since the beginning of the century, the tradition has been gradually fading social novel; the influence of Western European decadence is growing; the literature of imperialist reaction is born in the person of Gabriele D'Annunzio and his imitators. The Italian avant-gardists, who noisily declared themselves in the late 900s as the renewers of dilapidated literary canons, turned out to be heralds of the cult of the machine, brute force, militaristic ideas, and heralds of fascism.

War 1914-1918 led to the collapse of many humanistic illusions, to rampant chauvinist tendencies in Italian culture. The Italian creative intelligentsia emerged from this era confused, having lost faith in the old moral and cultural values, but without finding new perspectives. The search for spiritual truths for bourgeois Italian writers was limited in those years to a narrow psychological and aesthetic sphere. Thus, the novel of the writer Italo Zvevo (1861-1928), Zeno's Consciousness (1924), which was a success, is entirely built on introspection, there is a break in it with the image of the real external world.

In the most acute socio-political situation of the early 1920s in Italy, when the forces of the revolutionary labor movement fought against the growing threat of fascisation of the country, the leading Italian writers, united around the influential magazine Ronda, called for moving away from "topicality", returning to the subject and forms of classical designs literature XIX in. Therefore, fascism, having come to power in the autumn of 1922, found Italian literature ideologically defenseless. Mussolini and his clique were not slow in launching the persecution of the left-wing democratic intelligentsia. The Fascist "emergency laws" of 1926 banned the young Communist Party of Italy, all opposition associations and press organs, placed anti-fascist thought and culture in the position of criminal "subversive elements".

Twenty years of the domination of fascism had a detrimental effect on Italian literature, isolated it from major social problems, which led to fragmentation and stagnation. The official fascist ideology, with its reactionary demagogy, could not attract any talented creative forces. The intelligentsia of Italy did not want to go to the service of fascism, but, being cut off from the life of the people, experienced a severe ideological and creative crisis. Not wanting to sing of fascism, many writers go into "art for art's sake". For the so-called "artistic prose" of those years, only formal skill is characteristic. In poetry at the end of the 1920s, the so-called current of "hermetism" appeared. The name speaks for itself: "Hermetic" poetry is closed in a circle of subjective-lyrical experiences, encrypted in associative images. Among the "hermetic" poets were big talents People: Eugenio Montale (b. 1896), Giuseppe Ungaretti (1883-1970), Umberto Saba (1883-1967). They created poems full of deep lyricism, a tragic sense of life, but inaccessible to the perception of a wide reader due to the complexity of expressive means. The very names of some poetry collections are characteristic: Ungaretti's The Joy of Shipwrecks, Montale's Cuttlefish Shells.

An illusory way of transforming "anti-poetic" reality was the direction of "magic realism" headed by Massimo Bontemnelli (1878-1960). "Magical realism" sought to bridge the line between the real and the fantastic by combining fantasy with realistic detail.

The veto imposed by fascism on the truthful depiction of folk life led to a break in the Italian literature of the "Black Twenty" from one of the most fruitful prose traditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. - with the so-called school of "verism" (vero - truthful, true). "Verism" in his face the best representatives- Giuseppe Verga, Matilda Serao, Grazia Deledd, Luigi Capuana and others - realistically portrayed the hard life of the working people of Italy. The most important follower of the "veristic" tradition in Italian literature of the 900s was Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936). However, in his work even before 1914 (the collection of short stories "Novels for the Year", published since 1901, the novel "The Late Mattia Pascal", 1904), gloomy, pessimistic moods, a feeling of hopeless loneliness were growing.

The meaninglessness of life, of all human existence, sounds like a leitmotif in Pirandello's novel Spinning* (1916). In the painful atmosphere of fascism, the tragedy of Pirandello's attitude intensifies: the writer comes

to the concept of the unknowability of life, the elusiveness of any truth. A person cannot even comprehend himself, because his inner world is a receptacle for conflicting passions and impulses. This agnosticism, combined with the writer's hatred for the musty, sanctimonious bourgeois way of life, is revealed with great intensity in Pirandello's original plays, created in the period 1917-1929. The fame of Pirandello the playwright overshadowed the fame of Pirandello the prose writer.

Already in Pirandello's first play of the new period (he turned to the theater during the First World War), the writer's pessimistic credo was fully reflected. The title of this drama - "It's so - if it seems so to you" (1917, revised in 1925) - can be put as an epigraph to almost all of his subsequent dramas. Through the mouth of one of the characters, who plays the role of the author's mouthpiece, Pirandello shows that the relationships that have been created between the official Ponza, his wife and his mother-in-law cannot be clarified by real logic. Ponza and his mother-in-law think each other is crazy: the mother-in-law considers his wife to be her daughter, who, according to Ponza, died long ago. And the young woman, as it were, does not have a true self of her own, calling herself "the one that each of them considers me to be."

In Pirandello's drama Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), which brought him world fame, the theme of the unknowability of the inner world of man is combined with the theme of art. In a family of six people, the spiritual life of each of them is alien and incomprehensible to the rest. Everyone wears a kind of "mask of feelings", corresponding to the external forms of life. “Each of us in vain imagines himself invariably one, whole, while we have a thousand and more appearances,” says the father of the family. The family comes to the theater with a request to embody their drama on stage: perhaps then truth and plausibility will coincide, saving them from a tragic misunderstanding. Before and art turns out to be powerless to show all the versatility of a person and prevent the gloomy denouement of a family drama.

The theme of separation, alienation of people from themselves and from others is inextricably linked in the best plays of Pirandello with the depiction of cruel social reality. The illusions that the hero Pirandello creates for himself turn out to be a futile attempt to hide from the falsity of bourgeois morality, from real poverty and injustice. So, in the play “The Naked Dress” (1922), the poor lonely girl Ersilia, deceived by people, confused and committed an ugly act, in which she repents heavily, wants to die, leaving behind a legend of purity. However, the clothes of a beautiful lie are torn from her by the curious, seeking to get to the bottom of the "truth". At the same time, her accusers are involuntarily exposed, also disguising themselves in rags of noble feelings. But these more fortunate people keep peace of mind because each of them has already managed to adapt to life. And Ersilia, thrown to the sidelines, outcast, dies, "not having been able to get dressed."

In the tragedy "Henry IV" (1922), the hero, who has experienced a deep moral shock, pretends to be a madman who imagines himself to be the German Emperor Henry IV. He tries to hide under the mask of a medieval king, to live with his already non-existent worries and feelings. But even this illusory way out is taken away from him by his former enemies, who see in his "madness" a reflection of real facts. In the play “The Life I Give You” (1923), a mother who has lost her Son is powerless, by the power of her own spirit, to preserve for herself the image of the deceased.

Thus, the hero of Pirandello is still a suffering, rushing about person, deeply woven into the everyday life of social existence. But for the idealist writer, this historically determined reality turns into an eternal philosophical category.

In search of overcoming human alienation, Pirandello again and again returns to the theme of art, to the theater. He was deeply concerned with the very principles acting designed to reveal the inner inconsistency of a person. Pirandello created a kind of trilogy of "theater within the theater", the first part of which was the play "Six Characters in Search of an Author". In the following two plays about the theatre, the playwright nevertheless finds in the theatrical action that means of human communication that is capable of affirming moral truths. So, in the play “To Each in His Own Way” (1924), the theatrical characters helped two genuine heroes of the life drama to realize their feelings, to accept for themselves the conclusion that was proposed by the actors on the stage. “They did what art anticipated,” says one of the “spectators” in the play.

In one of his most acute and innovative dramas, Today We Improvise (1929), Pirandello returns from closed psychological problems to living reality - the life of his native Sicily with its cruel morals and prejudice, a dilapidated "code of honor." The heroine, a young woman, Mommin, languishes in the locked house of her husband, who torments her with jealousy, reproaches for the immoral behavior of her sisters, who have become singers. He forbids Mommina herself from singing; but the power of art conquers this stale world—wins at the cost of Mom-mina's life. The plot of the play is intertwined with the general ideas of Pirandello about the goals and forms of art, set forth by one of the characters -: an imaginary director. Actors who allegedly improvise, breaking away from the author's text, introduce the viewer into the acting system.

Pirandello radically updated the Italian theater, introduced deep universal problems there. The best dramas of Pirandello are not philosophical abstract schemes, but deep tragedies of suffering people.

Fascism tried in every possible way to claim "property rights" to Pirandello, who was the only Italian writer of the 1920s and 1930s who won world fame. However, the inner pathos of Pirandello's work, his yearning for humanistic values ​​trampled on by a cruel life, his faith in the purifying power of art - all this, of course, belonged not to fascist demagogy, but to genuine high national culture Italy.

Only a very few Italian writers during the period of the fascist dictatorship broke through to the social theme, which in these cases invariably entailed the denunciation of fascism. It was during these years that the main problems of the work of one of the most prominent modern writers in Italy, Alberto Moravia (born in 1907), were determined. He began his literary career with the novel The Indifferent (1929), which immediately brought fame to its author.

In this novel, the mastery of psychological analysis inherent in Moravia's talent has already acquired a social, anti-fascist coloring. "Indifferent" are representatives of the privileged strata of Italian society, immoral, cynical, indifferent to good and evil. The protagonist of the novel, Gino, watches with complete apathy the fall of his sister, corrupted by his mother's lover. Gino feels no resentment, no shame (he lives off the man's means), no urge for revenge or rebellion. Having shown this loss of moral criteria among the bourgeois youth of the 1920s, whom the fascist hacks praised at that time as the "generation of new Romans", Moravia acted objectively as an exposer of the spiritual corruption that fascism brought with it.

In the 1930s, Moravia, however, did not touch on specific socio-political topics in his work, delving more and more into the psychology of the "indifferent" - the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, officials, stigmatizing their opportunism, spiritual coldness. During these years, in the cycle of allegorical stories by Moravia (the collection Epidemic, 1944) one can hear skepticism, disbelief in social progress, the motive of the absurdity of the world. The writer is unable to escape from the surrounding stuffy atmosphere.

Anti-fascist sentiments were more clearly expressed in Italian literature in the late 1930s under the influence of the struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and as a protest against Italy's imperialist action in Abyssinia. Moravia creates at this time a sharply satirical novel "Masquerade", in which a certain Latin American dictator is rather transparently ridiculed. The novel was printed in France, where Moravia lived in the early 40s.

The highest achievement of Italian prose on the eve of the Second World War was the book of the writer Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) Sicilian Conversations, written in 1938-1941. In this work, original in its genre, the anti-fascist orientation is combined with a turn to the folk theme, although in many respects it is still conditional. Sicilian Conversations is a story about the half-real, half-allegorical journey of the author-narrator to his homeland, to Sicily, where he goes, vaguely hoping to free himself from the feeling of "abstract fury" that everyday life causes him.

Ordinary people met on the way become symbolic images accompanying the writer in his thoughts. Abandoned, starving Sicilian village turns into the personification of the motherland, desecrated, insulted, concealing latent anger. With impressive power, the image of the Mother is written out in the book, which also contains a symbolic generalization: a suffering peasant woman is a living protest against fascism, which sends peasant sons to perish in an unjust war of conquest in Abyssinia.

The book is written in "Aesopian language"; the writer resorts to hints, omissions, leaves much in the subtext, using Hemingway's stylistic experience. Nevertheless, for the Italian reading public, the protest contained in the Sicilian Conversations against the fascist dictatorship, which equally suppresses the life of the people and the spiritual life of the intelligentsia, was clear. The deep task of the book was, first of all, the solution of the problem of the intellectual, an attempt to find a way out for it. And although the answer is given in the "Sicilian Conversations" in a conditional, symbolic form, however, its meaning is in gaining spiritual contact with the people.

In 1937, the founder and leader of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, died in a fascist dungeon after 11 years of hardest imprisonment. Only after the end of the Second World War did the Italian people and the whole world become aware of Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" - historical-philosophical, literary-aesthetic studies he created in prison. Gramsci's literary works, collected in the volume "Literature and National Life", develop the problems of Marxist aesthetics that are important for Italian culture in their national-historical interpretation.

Gramsci introduces into his aesthetic theory the concept of "national-folk" (nazionale-popolare), understanding it as a culture closely connected with the most important problems of folk life. “A work of art is popular when its moral, cultural, psychological content is close to the morality, culture and feelings of the nation, understood not as something static, but as being in continuous development,” he wrote. Gramsci emphasized that Italy still had the task of creating such a truly folk-national literature and art, for "the Italian intelligentsia is far from the people and is connected with the caste tradition."

From these positions, Gramsci criticized the Italian bourgeois culture of the period of fascism, scourging its skepticism, detachment from people's life, exposed the demagogy of the fascist hacks with their immoralism and the cult of strength as a "new value". He connected the creation of an advanced Italian culture with the coming powerful popular movement, on the basis of which the gap between the intelligentsia and the masses would be eliminated.

The significance of Gramsci's ideas for the development of modern Italian culture is enormous; their growing influence is reflected in the entire intellectual life of the country in the post-war period.

The truth of Gramsci's ideas was confirmed by history itself. The anti-fascist resistance that unfolded in 1943-1945 ended on April 25, 1945 with a nationwide uprising against the fascists and the Nazi occupiers. The collapse of the Mussolini regime, the creation of a broad popular "front of Resistance" helped the best forces of Italian culture to emerge from the spiritual tunic, to find a source of inspiration in the people and their struggle. In the anti-fascist struggle, barriers were destroyed between the people and the intelligentsia, which overwhelmingly took part in the Resistance.

In the harsh everyday life of the people, illuminated by the flames of the anti-fascist struggle, the writers of Italy saw the true historical content. The depiction of reality, the people's environment, a return to social themes, liberation from the formalistic canons of "hermeticism" - these are the major aesthetic shifts that the epic of the Resistance brought to Italian literature. This turn found its artistic embodiment in those works that appeared in Italy in the very first years after the end of the war, and then it deepened and consolidated during the 59s, mainly in the rich and varied Italian prose.

First postwar decade a stream of new, young forces joined the literature of Italy. This generation felt the need to tell, first of all, about the experience of the Resistance, about the inhumanity of the Nazis, about the life of the partisans. These themes have taken a leading place in post-war novels and short stories, in memoir prose and film scripts. Such are Wittorsch's "People and Inhumans" (1945), which tells about the high sacrifice of anti-fascists opposing "non-humans", evil and stupid Nazis. Such are the novels “Agnese Goes to Death” (1949) by Renata Vigano, “Fausto and Anna” (1952) by Carlo Caesola, the story “The Path of Spider Nests” (1949) by Italo Calvino, short stories by Marcello Venturi and many others. The writers also turned to the image of the recent, past - the period of fascism, trying to show the hard lot of the people during the years of the "Black Twenty" and the incessant Resistance ("Christ Stopped at Eboli" by Carlo Levi, 1945, "Old Comrades" by Carlo Caesola, 1953, "Speranza" Silvia-Maggi Bonfanti, 1954, Lands of Sacramento by Francesco Iovine, 1950, novels by Vasco Pratolini).

Since the beginning of the 1950s, the theme of the present day, the problems of the life and work of the Italian common people, the “questions of conscience” that concern the Italian intelligentsia in the post-war world, have increasingly dominated Italian literature since the beginning of the 1950s. The lives of the poor people of Naples are dedicated to the novels and stories of Dome-daco Rea (“What Cummeo Saw”, 1956), plays by Eduardo de Filippo (“Naples Millionaire”, 1945, “Filumena Marturano”, 1947, “Lies on long legs", 1948, etc.). K. Kassola writes about the fate of young people in Post-War Marriage (1957); the causes of the disasters of the peasantry and urban unemployed in Sicily are revealed by Danilo Dolci in the documentary reports "Bandits in Partiniko" (1955), "Investigation in Palermo" (1956). Essays by K. Levy "Words-stones" (1955) show the growth of consciousness ordinary people who rise to fight for their rights, overcoming frozen customs and prejudices. Acute moral and ethical problems facing the intelligentsia in the context of the stabilization of Italian capitalism are raised by I. Calvino in the stories Construction Speculation (1957) and Smog Cloud (1958).

Despite the difference in political views and artistic manner, all these writers are brought together by a common aesthetic and civic position; the desire to realistically show the Italian reality, to assess the present and past of their country based on the fate common man, history maker. So it was born in Italian literature and art at the turn of the Resistance and the first. post-war years, the direction of neorealism. Neorealism was at the same time a return to the realistic tradition from modernist movements 20-30s, who were unable to endure the "load" of the Resistance; at the same time, he was the realism of modern times, striving to show modern man and the reality that shapes him. Neorealist literature, cinema, art Italy were an important stage in the development of the national realistic tradition, a great achievement of Italian culture, which put it in the avant-garde place in Western European culture of the post-war years.

Although Italian neorealism in literature was by no means homogeneous either in artistic manner or in theoretical settings, nevertheless, the “common origin” gave this literary polyphony a certain general tone.

Italian neorealism of the 1940s and 1950s can be characterized as an anti-fascist, democratic direction, posing social problems in their national, Italian guise, imbued with a humanistic mood, faith in the power of popular solidarity, in the high spiritual qualities of the common man. Neo-realist writers sought to free Italian literature from clerical obscurantism, from provincialism and imitation, from the obscurity of poetic language.

Neorealism is autobiographical. Documentary authentic episodes of the war, Nazi occupation, partisan struggle were colored by the lyrical intonation of the narrative. The story of the central character in the stories of Calvino and Cassola, Pratolini and Bonfanti in many ways embodied life path and the evolution of the authors themselves during the years of the Resistance. Such a “lyrical document” was a distinct methodological device of neorealism: the hero, and with him the author, “realizes himself”, chooses his path in the midst of real terrible events, socio-historical clashes, and not in a narrow circle of psychological experiences. The "Lyrical Document" is a kind of time stamp in Italian neo-realism, which sought to re-feel, to pass through itself those events of people's life that remained outside the literature of the "Black Twenty".

Neorealism is characterized by an appeal to a new circle of heroes. These are simple people who are depicted not with sad pity, but with a sense of pride in their strengths and capabilities. At first, these images were given only in the external drawing, and then they began to acquire depth and versatility. So, the heroine of the novel by Renata Viganò, the old peasant woman Agnese, who came to the partisan detachment on a sudden impulse, gradually realizes lofty goals liberation struggle and without hesitation gives his life to it. Such are the "old comrades" from the story of K. Kassol - underground communists who have not lost faith in the coming victory in the most bleak years of fascism. The heroes of Levi's essays "Words-Stones", the courageous Speranza from Bonfanti's story are experiencing a difficult formation of characters in the course of dramatic events in which they are participants. True, the hero of a neorealist narrative does not always grow to the scale of a typical character.

Closely connected with the emergence of a new hero is another characteristic of neorealism - its humanism and optimism, the desire to show the great power of popular solidarity - a theme that permeates many books about guerrilla warfare and the struggle for a better future in post-war Italy. This motive sounds with great force in many Italian neo-realist films of the 50s (Road of Hope, Girls from the Spanish Square, Bitter Rice, Two Pennies of Hope).

Neorealism infused new life into all genres of literature. The novel was resurrected as an epic narration about the events and deeds of people, and not as a "stream of consciousness". Eduardo de Filippo (born in 1900) in his comedies sought to combine the traditions of the Italian dialectal theater with the psychological dramaturgy of Pirandello.

Poetry gradually freed itself from "hermetic" complexity. The poet Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1970), who began as a "hermetist", turned to reality during the period of the Resistance (the collection Day by Day, 1947, which collected his anti-fascist poems from the period of the liberation struggle). Quasimodo sings of the feat of the partisans, a civic theme sounds in his poems, he affirms faith in genuine living values ​​(collections “Life is not a dream”, 1949, “Incomparable Earth”, 1958). The poet Pier-Paolo Pasolini (born in 1922) draws hope from the life of the Roman workers on the outskirts of the coming liberation of working people, of all mankind (poem "The Ashes of Gramsci", 1957).

The poet and storyteller Gianni Rodari (born in 1920) creates a new children's literature, imbued with the spirit of life's truth, free from clerical morality and petty-bourgeois sentimentality. In the poetry of Rodari ("The Book of Jolly Poems", 1951, "Poems in Heaven and on Earth", 1960, etc.), there is a closeness to Italian children's folklore. His fairy tales The Adventures of Cipollino (1951), The Voyage of the Blue Arrow (1957) and many others combine perky humor, social satire and belief in a better future for all the children of the world.

The great conquest of neorealism was the simplicity and clarity of the language, the widespread use folk speech both in prose and poetry. It was neorealist works, with all their advantages and disadvantages, that determined the face of Italian literature in the second half of the 1940s and in the 1950s.

One of the most prominent representatives of neorealist prose is the writer Vasco Pratolini (born in 1913).

Pratolini was born in Florence, in a poor family, he began his working life early, studied in fits and starts. Pratolini began writing in the late 1930s, but almost never published under fascism. The talent of the writer, an active participant in the Resistance, was revealed after the end of the Second World War.

Pratolini's work was based on autobiographical material: the life of the poor in his native quarter, hometown. During the period of the Resistance, the writer's horizons expanded: the theme of the anti-fascist struggle flows into the "family chronicle", fanned with lyricism and poetry, the song of friendship and solidarity acquires social pathos.

Pratolini seeks to see the fate of his generation in a historical perspective. In the novel The Quarter (1945), he depicts the life and difficult paths of the young men and women of the working-class quarter of Florence in the 1930s, in the poisoned atmosphere of fascism. The book is imbued with a deep faith in the vitality of this youth, in their future, which, as the heroes of the book gradually begin to understand, they will have to “conquer on the barricades”, like air and the sun.

Pratolini's best novel, The Tale of Poor Lovers (1947), which brought him European fame, tells the fate of his native Florence during the dark period of open fascist terror in 1925-1926. The author draws the everyday life of the inhabitants of a small street in Via del Corno, inhabited by working people. In their sorrows and joys, feelings and actions, a living and beautiful image of the people arises, a rich and multifaceted national character that combines human dignity, courage and kindness, optimism and resilience. Via del Corno becomes, as it were, a collective hero, in which, of course, there are also shadow sides generated by poverty and ignorance, but a high sense of justice and humanity prevails. It is this that does not allow Via del Corno to accept fascism with its ideology of violence and corrupt morality.

But there are heroes of a higher level in Pratolini's novel, in whose personal fate the historical fate of the people is condensed. First of all, this is the blacksmith Corrado, nicknamed Maciste (“strongman”), in whom the features of a folk, national character are combined with a high social ideal and the will to fight. Maciste is a communist, and his devotion to a great cause makes him capable of heroic deed. The "Terrible Night" invades the daily life of Via del Corno: armed fascists roam the city, cracking down on progressive figures. Machiste races his motorcycle from street to street, warning of danger. Blackshirts kill a courageous anti-fascist. The life and death of Corrado is an example for others, for young people from Via del Corno - Hugo and Gesuina, Mario and Milena, who after " Terrible Night understood which side the truth is on. The conviction in the final victory of the people, despite the temporary triumph of dark forces, is the ideological pathos of the novel. The epic of the Resistance helped the writer gain a correct perspective on the tragic events of the past and reach the artistic heights of realistic generalization.

After several works devoted to the folk life of post-war Italy, Pratolini in the novel Metello (1955) returns to the image of the past, trying to show in Italian history the bearers of genuine progress. The hero of the novel is a young worker, Metello, who led a general builders' strike in Florence at the beginning of the 20th century. Both the theme of the work and its central character were completely new material for Italian literature; the very concept of what was depicted was also innovative - to represent the course of history through the struggle of the working class and the formation of its self-consciousness. This idea found a convincing artistic embodiment in the novel as a whole. The image of the young working boy Metello, who goes through the school of life and labor solidarity on scaffolding, is charming. The strike he organizes shapes the character of himself, his wife Ersidia and many others. In this sense, Pratolini's novel is a "sensory education" novel. The public in it is inextricably linked with personal experiences, which brings richness and completeness into the inner world of the characters. All these artistic successes on life material, unusual for the Italian tradition, made "Metello" a certain milestone in the literary development of the 50s. Readers' and critical discussions flared up around the novel.

But at the same time, Pratolini's book revealed some significant "innate flaws" of neo-realism: its inability to enlarge events, move away from chronicle. Metello himself is more of an "average type" than a generalized typical character. His image is less significant than the image of Maciste, although, according to the author's intention, he had to bear a large burden.

"Metello" Pratolini, as it were, embodied the "ceiling" of neorealism as a method, which in the second half of the 50s showed clear symptoms of a crisis. The changed socio-historical situation in Italy, the establishment of the dominance of monopoly capital in it, demanded clearer ideological positions from progressive writers. The general democratic mood, faith in the people's solidarity and the strength of the people's moral foundations turned out to be insufficient for understanding the new social processes. The vagueness of socio-political views led many neorealist writers to confusion, inability to master the new reality artistically; notes of disappointment sounded in their work; some began to "enrich" their palette with modernist techniques; some fell silent for a while.

Progressive Italian criticism rightly pointed out that the realistic vision of the world no longer fit into the framework of neorealism, that literature approached the search for new means of reflecting the more complex reality.

Sixties of the XX century. showed that neorealism, which undoubtedly played a huge role in literary development Italy, no longer defines the main stream of literature.

The problem of the relationship between the so-called "neo-capitalist" society and man has become most acute in the Italian literature of the last decade. This dilemma is revealed in literature primarily from the inside, in showing the inner world of the individual. This trend in literature is manifested in the transfer of interest to the moral and psychological complex of modern man. However, with this consideration of spiritual human values, Italian realism at the present stage remains emphatically social. This certainly affects the "leaven" of the Resistance and neo-realistic experience.

Just as important for Italian literature of the 1960s was the problem of a person's moral responsibility to society, to his era. This ethical load can be felt in all genres of modern Italian literature - whether it be a reportage, a philosophical-allegorical novel or publicistic poetry. There is a process of intellectualization of Italian realism, seeking new artistic means for. the embodiment of this complex moral and social problem.

It is possible to outline in general terms several thematic and problem nodes of Italian prose of the last decade.

The anti-fascist, anti-war novel deepens, calling not to forget about inhumanity, to make it impossible to return the past. The most interesting in this respect is the novel by the writer Marcello Venturi (b. 1925) The White Flag over Kefallinia (1963). It tells about the brutal massacre of the Nazi troops with the Italian division, which refused to surrender in 1943, on a small island of the Ionian archipelago. Resurrecting a real event of the past, the writer emphasizes the inseparable connection between the past and the present. That terrible psychology of the “superman”, supposedly having the right to violence and murder, which was brought up by the ideology of fascism and Nazism, should not be revived.

A whole group of writers, with great power of satirical exposure, shows another - more "modern" - form of distortion of the human psyche in the grip of "neo-capitalism" with its fetishization of technology and depersonalizing forms of human management. Libero Bijaretti's psychological novel "Congress" (1964) sounds poignant, showing opportunism, the spiritual renegade of a former progressive journalist who has gone to work in a large monopoly, losing his convictions in exchange for a secure existence.

Goffredo Parise's grotesque novel The Boss (1964) shows how a large firm turns a young employee into a "robot with production ideas" who bows to the glamor of a flourishing monopoly enterprise.

The moral and ethical problems of our time arose with particular sharpness in the post-war work of Alberto Moravia.

The events of the liberation struggle had a profound impact on the writer, in many ways changed the range of his interests and topics in the 50s. In the collection of short stories "Roman Tales" (1953), he refers to the everyday life of ordinary people, drawing their feelings and experiences, misadventures and simple luck, revealing in a laconic psychological novella the spiritual world of folk characters - working guys and saleswomen, small shopkeepers, employees and the unemployed " the eternal city. However, the heroes of Moravia, as a rule, are alone, no one will lend a helping hand to them. The motif of popular solidarity, so characteristic of neorealist literature, is absent from the Roman Tales. "

A tribute to the Resistance, according to the author himself, was the novel Chocharka (1957). In the center of the book simple woman who survived the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation. Moravia showed the strength of the people's character, condemned the war, which distorts the very nature of man. A new hero for Moravia also appeared in the novel - an anti-fascist intellectual who is dying at the hands of the invaders. Nevertheless, this image showed the author's obvious ignorance of such people in life: his Michele is again a loner.

However, since the mid-1950s, Moravia has returned to the old themes again, with great sensitivity to psychological analysis, revealing new shades of moral decay in the Italian bourgeois of the post-war model. In the novel Contempt (1954), an almost pamphlet-like exposure of modern bourgeois pseudo-art “for the masses” is combined with the theme of people's alienation as a result of the growing power of monetary relations. This theme is even more disturbing in Moravia's Boredom (1960). With the word "boredom", the artist Dino defines his painfully felt isolation from real life, which deprives him of the opportunity to create, to perceive the world artistically. His rich mother perceives such aloofness as the norm: fetishized secular relationships replace natural human feelings, money becomes flesh and blood. However, the hero is looking for a way out of the situation exclusively in the field of Erotica. By linking sex and alienation into one knot, overloading the novel with a description of erotic ones. scenes, Moravia significantly weakened the social and artistic sound of his book.

Here it is appropriate to say that in modern Italian literature it has become more difficult to meet a positive hero. Gone were the images of courageous and steadfast people of neorealism, to whom so many hands reached out, who won by their very death. The new social reality has apparently not yet been sufficiently "mastered" by Italian literature of the 1960s, which, by its sharply critical attitude towards the bourgeois order, cannot make up for this loss.

One of the few exceptions in this regard is Vasco Pratolini's The Persistence of Reason (1963), written by the author after a long silence and several creative failures. In The Persistence of Mind, Pratolini seeks to combine several lines of his work: an interest in young hero, a look at reality from a historical perspective and showing the inner world of a person from the people.

This novel is an undoubted success of the author, who managed to artistically convincingly show " spiritual development a working guy, going from a kind of anarchist "communism of feeling" to the realization of a severe duty to life, to the constancy of the mind. By shifting the sequence of time in the narrative, Pratolini intersperses the first-person narrative with flashbacks. This technique recreates a picture of the life of Italy in the post-war twenty years in the soul of a teenager. Social conflicts enter his spiritual experience along with youthful passions and disappointments. Pratolini shows how the best part of the Italian working youth, by the very logic of life, by the very conditions of their existence, comes to the ideas of struggle, to the ideals of communism. Along with the young Bruno, rushing about and inconsistent, the author brings out the communist of the "old guard" Milloski, who, without loud phrases, with his life and actions, gradually convinces the young man of the rightness of his cause.

Irreconcilability to "neo-capitalism", hostile to the life of the people and the free development of the individual, leads the progressive literature of Italy to the creation of truthful, socially saturated works.

Lecture #24

Italian literature of the 20th century

Plan

1. general characteristics Italian Literature of the 20th Century.

2. The ideological and artistic originality of the work of A. Moravia:

a) a brief overview of the life and creative path of the writer;
b) the tragic disunity and loneliness of people in the novel "The Indifferent";
c) the image of Rome in the novel "The Roman Woman" and the collection "Roman Stories";
d) the problems of the novel "Chochara";
e) features of the style of A. Moravia.

3. The ideological and artistic originality of U. Eco's work:

a) A brief overview of the creative path of the writer;
b) The Name of the Rose as an intertextual novel;
c) the problems of the novel "Foucault's Pendulum".

1. General characteristics of Italian literature of the twentieth century

Italian literature of the 20th century is closely connected with the complex historical and political processes that took place in the country and the world as a whole. The development of literature and culture at the beginning of the century was influenced by fascist ideology, then the historical experience of the Second World War and the Resistance led to shifts in national life in all sectors of society. A different direction appears in literature, an appeal to the themes of war and resistance, a reflection of the dramatic events experienced by the country and the change in aesthetic values. The work of Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Carlo Levi, Renata Vingano is proof of this.

The current of Italian neo-realism received worldwide resonance. In the 1940s and 1950s, many figures of Italian cinema and literature came forward in line with neorealism. Program works Italian neorealism was Rossellini's film "Rome - an open city" and Vasco Pratolini's novel "The Tale of Poor Lovers". The work of Albert Moravia is associated with neorealism. This literature strove for a truthful depiction of reality, looking for new means artistic skill, simple and clear literary language. The theorist of Italian neorealism D. Zavatini wrote: “The people are knocking imperiously on the doors of art, and woe to us if we do not open them.”

Widely known is the work of Dino Buzzati (1906-1972), who did not adjoin any literary movement. Buzzati was perceived by critics as a successor to Kafka. He wrote about the fate of a person in the conditions of an inhumane civilization, conveyed the absurdity of life, turned to fantasy. Unlike Kafka, the Italian writer does not renounce belief in man's ability to maintain his dignity.

The novels Barnabo from the Mountains (1933), The Mystery of the Old Forest (1935), The Tatar Desert (1939), as well as fantastic short stories (the collection Seven Messengers (1942)) confirm this.

Postmodernism in Italian literature is represented by the work of Umberto Eco (b. 1932), writer and philosopher, semiotic scientist and critic. In his writings, he addresses the problems of postmodern aesthetics ("The Open Work" (1962), "Joyce's Poetics" (1966), "Treatise on General Semiotics" (1975)). Eco's novels - "The Name of the Rose" (1980), "Foucault's Pendulum" (1988) - are philosophical in nature, reveal the writer's desire to create a picture of the world in the dynamics of culture and the development of consciousness. The cosmological model of the world is created in the novel "The Name of the Rose". The evolution of European consciousness is traced in Foucault's Pendulum, in which modernity is presented in a retrospective of previous eras.

2. The ideological and artistic originality of the work of A. Moravia:

A. A brief overview of the life and work of the writer

Alberto Moravia(1907-1990) - a well-known Italian novelist and short story writer, who, following Pirandello, turned to the topic of human alienation and disunity of people in contemporary Italy of the 20s (the novel The Indifferent (1929)), who developed anti-fascist and anti-war themes (novels " Masquerade (1941), Chochara (1957)), after the war he became close to the literature of neo-realism (New Roman Tales (1959)). The author wrote about the decline and decay of bourgeois families, about the fate of the artist in the conditions of modern civilization (the novels Contempt (1954), Boredom (1960)), about ordinary Italians - residents of Rome, in whose depiction the lyrical is combined with the ironic, the sad - with funny. The realism of Moravia is distinguished by the subtlety of socio-psychological analysis and satirical intonations. Alberto Moravia (real name Pinkerle) was born in Rome, and the image of the "eternal city" is captured in his work. The writer's father is an architect. A severe disease of bone tuberculosis, which befell Alberto at the age of 9 and forced him to spend many years in medical sanatoriums, largely determined his passion for reading, eventually prompting him to try his hand at literary activity. At the age of 16, he began writing his first novel, finished it in 1925 and published it at his own expense in 1929 under the title The Indifferent. This book is one of the author's most powerful works. She determined his future. In the first half of the 1930s, Moravia lived in London, then in Paris. The publication of the novel "Masquerade" (1941), in which a fictional image of the dictator of one of the countries of Central America, depicted in a satirical way, aroused the wrath of Mussolini, who saw, not without reason, a caricature of himself. A ban was placed on the publication of Moravia's books. In 1943, he was declared a "subversive figure" and was forced to hide in the mountains. He returned to Rome only after being liberated by his allies. The recognition that came to the writer after the publication of his first novel strengthened over the years. Key works of Moravia - "Indifferent", "Roman stories", "Ciochara".

B. The tragic disunity and loneliness of people in the novel "The Indifferent"

The novel was conceived by the young writer as a tragedy. Events are limited to a narrow circle of one Roman family, embodying the social tragedy of the era - indifference. The businessman Leo Merumechi was for many years the lover of Mariagrazia, a wealthy widow with two children. Over the years, Leo ruined a woman, and when she grew old, he seduced her daughter Carla. The girl did not love Leo, but she had no other perspective, because she is a dowry. Her brother Michele, a lethargic and inert young man, understands the meanness of Leo, who broke their family, ruined them. But stronger than hatred is his indifference, indifference to moral standards. Michele forces himself to quarrel with Leo, and when he finds out that Leo has become his sister's lover, he shoots him. But all attempts are unsuccessful, Michele does not have a sincere impulse. The denouement does not change anything in the position of the young heroes. Leo decides to marry Carla, but her life will be as dull and false as the life of her mother, as the life of the whole environment, which made her brother and sister “indifferent”. The image of Michele is complex. The hero is smart, but not resolute, conceited, but cowardly. He has no energy, no desire to resist what is happening. The focus on introspection separates Michele from those around him. He can make fun of himself, realizing his indifference and powerlessness, but he is not able to overcome them and act. Indifference gives rise to spiritual deafness, the desire to withdraw into oneself. All events in the novel take place over two days. It's raining outside the windows. Only for a moment the sun's rays break through the clouds without penetrating into dark world anti-heroes of the Moravia novel.

In The Indifferent, Moravia moves from the psychology of one character to the psychology of another, highlighting the emotions and inner world of each.

Characters in "Indifferent" do not develop. All characters at the end remain the same as they were at the beginning of the novel. In all scenes, everyone remains within their role, with the same behavior: Leo's calm impudence, Mariagrazia's jealous antics, Carla's outbursts of anger and indignation, giving way to humility, Michele's futile attempts to start a quarrel. The tension of the situation grows only as a result of Leo's actions. He is the only engine of events, he knows what he is trying to achieve.

The novel "The Indifferent" is the first milestone in the creative path of Moravia. This is a reality novel of that time, exposing social vices. The novel shows spiritual emptiness younger generation privileged classes of the 1920s. The action takes place at a time when Mussolini claimed that the ideas of fascism would inspire youth with the moral prowess of the ancient Romans. Moravia's hatred for this little world, for this psychological type, for egoism, not only did not weaken, but over the years acquired the scourging power of satire. The writer forgives nothing for the indifferent. Fascism left a bitter aftertaste in the writer's soul for the rest of his life, gave rise to moral reflections. And every year this anti-fascist tone sounded more and more clearly, although Moravia admitted that he had no idea of ​​exposing social system fascism.

C. The image of Rome in the novel "The Roman Woman" and the collection "Roman Stories"

In 1947, the writer created the novel "Roman Woman" (1947), in 1953 "Roman stories", which were later supplemented with new collections, so that the concept of "Roman story" began to claim the status literary term. The image of Rome in these works acquires global generalization, and at the same time, the novel and stories are distinguished by natural concreteness and locality. The characters of the works are ordinary people of Rome, forced to look for ways to survive at any cost, and most often at the cost of abandoning morality. In The Roman Woman, the main character Adrian - a woman with the face of a Madonna and the spiritual cynicism of a harlot - becomes "available" without much remorse, although she dreams of beautiful love. There are three men in her life, and in each of them there is a part of her soul. The first of them is the boss of the fascist police of Asturita, who is obsessively in love with Adriana, the second is the strong bandit Sonzogno, for whom Adriana has a carnal passion, and the third is a student from a noble family, Giacomo Diodati, a member of the anti-fascist Resistance, whom Adriana loves with her soul. Events are drawn into a knot at the end of the novel: Giacomo goes to prison, in a fit of strange apathy (the motive of fatal indifference!) He names his comrades in the Resistance. Adriana demands that Asturita release Giacomo immediately. The policeman in love fulfills her request unquestioningly. Giacomo's betrayal has no consequences, but the young man cannot forgive himself for his dishonorable act and takes his own life.

The woman bitterly mourns Giacomo, almost not noticing the death of Asturita and Sonzogno. Adriana wants to entrust her future child, whose father is considered by an accessible Roman to be the bandit Sonzogno, to the family of her beloved Giacomo. The theme of the future of Italy is connected with this born being, and the very image of the harlot Adriana seems to be cleared: the features of the Madonna, the human mother, are cleared in it. This work is characterized by morality, household parts, but most of all - psychological. At the same time, political overtones are noticeable in it, the condemnation of fascism as a moral impoverishment.

In 1953, the first book of Roman Tales by Alberto Moravia was published. In 1959, the writer publishes the second volume. Roman Tales resurrects the Boccaccio tradition: a short, eventful novella with an unexpected ending. There is a single theme: the life of labor Rome, shown in sketch pictures. At the same time, his working person is a loner, a “small” person. The hero is fundamentally new for Moravia. This is a city guy, the one who drives a taxi, stands behind the counter, washes dishes in a restaurant, wanders in search of work.

Lifelikeness, democracy and lyricism bring the work closer to neorealism, but unlike the neorealists, Moravia never gives the theme of solidarity of ordinary people. They are separated, alone. This motif of disunity sounds almost tragic in the story "Romulus and Remus": two former friends in the Resistance, Remo and Romolo, after the war turn out to be almost beggars, and one of them, realizing his sin, robbed the other. As if nothing had changed since those distant times, when Romulus killed his brother Remus, and later founded the city, whose name is Rome. The tragic in the stories of the writer is adjacent to the comic.

One and the same technique unites all the "Roman Tales": the author is silent, and the heroes of the short stories themselves tell about what happened to them. This helps Moravia more clearly reveal his losers in a short story, even more clearly separates his artistic position from those authors who are constantly spinning on the stage, prompting faceless remarks to their characters.

D. The problems of the novel "Chochara"

Moravia turned to the depiction of popular life during the Second World War in the novel Ciocara (1957), which he himself defined as "an objective narrative of the suffering and poverty that gave rise to the Resistance." The heroine of the novel is a native of Chocharia, a peasant woman Chezira, who left her native places, moved to Rome and became a merchant. Her character embodies such character traits of a person from the people as stamina and energy, courage and endurance. Hard trials fall on her lot: together with her daughter Rosetta, she has to leave Rome during the war, overcome many difficulties, knowing the fate of the refugees. Cesira did not give in to fear when the British bombs fell and the German raids were carried out. Cesira had to endure the abuse of her daughter by the soldiers. It was a terrible blow that broke Rosetta. All this is told in the novel from the perspective of Chezira. She talks about her experience, hiding nothing, remembering the good and evil people she met on the path she traveled.

In the work, the former images of the writer appear in their new version: the dishonored Rosetta calmly and even almost willingly becomes a harlot, but Chezira hopes to restore her daughter's former faith in life and goodness.

Appears in "Chochar" and the figure of an intellectual. This is the anti-fascist Michele Festa, not a member of the Resistance, but a person close to him in spirit. This character does not look like the hero of the Indifferent. He is active in his humanity. Michele dies from a fascist bullet, standing up for the inhabitants of a village alien to him. The death of Michele responds with pain in the heart of Cesira, cleanses her soul.

The novel denounces war as a crime against humanity. Cesira comes to this conclusion, having gone through suffering, and ends her story with the words: “We were able to get out of the war in order to return to our life again, in which, of course, there was still a lot of darkness and mistakes, but this was the only life that we could live as Michele would tell us if he were with us.”

D. Features of the style of A. Moravia

AT creative process Moravia more than once modified the technique of style and novel structure. His ideal is "clairvoyant detachment". The writer examines some aspects of contemporary reality under a microscope, creates a type and mood. His vocabulary is quite simple, even meager, the main emphasis is on syntax. This style almost negates the lyrical elements.

The author does not set the task of illustrating social events, but there is psychological state society. Sometimes Moravia deliberately exacerbates this state by resorting to parody and mask. The writer has always been attracted to masks. He does not reproduce reality, but arranges masquerades, sometimes seeming more reliable than reality itself.

There is a tendency in novels to dramatize the action. Tragedy, in his opinion, is a synthetic art, and he achieves synthesis in the novel. The main thing in the literature of Moravia has always been a person, although, depicting a real person, he often resorted to abstraction, even absurdity. Despite life circumstances, a person is by nature humane, and is in constant conflict with the social order.

3. Ideological and artistic originality of U. Eco's creativity

A. A brief overview of the creative path of the writer

Umberto Eco(b. 1932) - one of the greatest writers of contemporary Italy. A famous linguist, semiotician, mass culture specialist, professor at Bologna and several world universities. He managed to become a symbol not only of strict academic science, but also of free artistic search.

In 1980, U. Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, which brought him worldwide literary fame. In 1988 and 1994, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Eve appear. In the intervals between artistic creativity, Eco regularly publishes collections of journalistic and scientific articles. He devises computer-based exams to select students for his seminar (competition of 70 people per seat) and delivers lecture courses that attract such crowds that there aren't even enough rooms in neighboring theaters.

As a cultural historian, Eco is known in the scientific world for his books: "The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas" (1970), "Household" (1973), "On the Periphery of the Empire" (1977), "On Mirrors" (1985), "The Semiology of Everyday Life" ( 1987) and Art and Beauty in Medieval Ethics (1987).

Literary critic Eco is famous for Joyce's Poetics (1966), for modern linguistics the work The Search for an Ideal Language (1993) is considered the base work.

His works The Open Work (1962), The Semiology of Visual Communications (1967), The Treatise on General Semiotics (1975), and The Limits of Interpretation (1990) are recognized as fundamental for world semiotics.

B. The Name of the Rose as an intertextual novel

"The Name of the Rose" - the first novel by Umberto Eco, published in 1980, became the first intellectual novel to top the lists of superbestsellers and brought the author worldwide fame. The film adaptation also contributed to the success of the work. The writer was awarded the prestigious Italian Strega Prize (1981) and the French Medici Prize (1982).

It turned out that the life of the inhabitants of the Benedictine monastery of the 14th century could be interesting to people of the 20th century. And not only because the author started detective and love intrigues. But also because the effect of personal presence was created.

Umberto Eco painting a picture medieval world, accurately describes historical events. For his novel, the author chose an interesting composition. In the so-called introduction, the author reports that an old manuscript of a monk named Adson falls into his hands, who tells about the events that happened to him in the XIV century. In a state of nervous excitement, the author revels in Adson's terrifying story and translates it for the modern reader. The subsequent account of events is supposedly a translation of an old manuscript.

The manuscript of Adson itself is divided into seven chapters, according to the number of days, and every day - into episodes dedicated to worship. Thus, the action in the novel takes place over seven days.

The story begins with the prologue: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Plot: [A young monk, Adson, on behalf of whom the story is being told, assigned to the learned Franciscan William of Baskerville, arrives at the monastery. Wilhelm, a former inquisitor, is assigned to investigate unexpected death monk Adelma Otransky. Wilhelm and his assistant begin an investigation. They are allowed to talk and walk everywhere except the library. But the investigation comes to a standstill, because all the roots of the crime lead to the library, which is the main value and treasury of the abbey, which contains a huge number of priceless books. Entrance to the library is prohibited even for monks, and books are not given to everyone and not all that are in the library. In addition, the library represents a labyrinth, legends about "wandering fires" and "monsters" are associated with it.

Wilhelm and Adson visit the library under the cover of night, from which they hardly manage to get out. There they meet new mysteries. Wilhelm and Adson reveal the secret life of the abbey (meetings of monks with corrupt women, homosexuality, drug use). Adson himself succumbs to the temptation of a local peasant woman. At this time, new murders are committed in the abbey (Venantius is found in a barrel of blood, Berengar of Arundel in a bath of water, Severin of St. Emmeran in his room with herbs), associated with the same secret that leads to the library, namely to a certain book. Wilhelm and Adson manage to partially unravel the library's labyrinth and find the "African Limit" cache, a walled-up room in which the treasured book is stored.

To solve the murders, Cardinal Bertrand Podzhetsky arrives at the abbey and immediately gets down to business. He detains Salvatore, a wretched freak who, wanting to attract the attention of a woman with a black cat, a rooster and two eggs, was detained along with an unfortunate peasant woman. The woman (Adson recognized her as his friend) was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned.

During the interrogation, the cellarer Remigius tells about the torments of Dolchin and Margarita, who were burned at the stake, and how he did not resist this, although he had a relationship with Margarita. In desperation, the cellarer takes on all the murders: Adelma from Ontanto, Venantia from Salvemek "for being too learned", Berengar of Arundel "out of hatred for the library", Severinus of St. Emmeran "for collecting herbs".

But Adson and Wilhelm still manage to solve the mystery of the library. Jorge - a blind old man, the main keeper of the library, hides from everyone the "Limit of Africa", which contains the second book of Aristotle's "Poetics", which is of great interest, around which there are endless disputes in the abbey. So, for example, in the abbey it is forbidden to laugh. Jorge acts as a judge for anyone who laughs inappropriately or even draws funny pictures. In his opinion, Christ never laughed, and he forbids others to laugh. Everyone treats Jorge with respect. They are afraid of him.

However, Jorge for many years was the real ruler of the abbey, who knew and kept all his secrets from the rest. When he began to go blind, he allowed an incomprehensible monk to the library, and at the head of the abbey he put a monk who obeyed him. When the situation got out of control and many people wished to unravel the mystery of the "African Limit" and take possession of the book of Aristotle, Jorge steals poison from Severin's laboratory and impregnates the pages of the cherished book with it. The monks, turning over and wetting their fingers with saliva, gradually die. With the help of Malachi, Jorge kills Severin, locks the Abbot, who also dies.

Wilhelm solves all this with his assistant. Finally, Jorge gives them Aristotle's Poetics to read, which rebuts Jorge's idea of ​​the sinfulness of laughter. According to Aristotle, laughter has a cognitive value, he equates it with art. For Aristotle, laughter is "good, pure power". Laughter is able to relieve fear: when a man laughs, he does not care about death. That's what Jorge is so afraid of. All his life, Jorge did not laugh and forbade others to do this, this gloomy old man, hiding the truth from everyone, established a lie.

As a result of the persecution, Jorge Adson drops the lantern, and a fire starts in the library, which cannot be extinguished. In three days the whole abbey will burn to the ground. Only a few years later, Adson, traveling through those places, comes to the ashes, finds a few precious fragments, so that later, by one word or sentence, at least an insignificant list of lost books can be restored.]

This is the interesting plot of the novel. "The Name of the Rose" is a kind of detective story set in a medieval monastery. Critic Cesare Zaccaria believes that the writer's appeal to the detective genre is due to the fact that "this genre was better than others in expressing the insatiable charge of violence and fear inherent in the world in which we live." Yes, undoubtedly, many particular situations of the novel and its main conflict are quite "read" as an allegorical reflection of the situation of the current, twentieth century.

The events in the novel give us the idea that we have a detective in front of us. The author, with suspicious persistence, offers just such an interpretation.

Yu. Lotman writes that “the fact that the Franciscan monk of the 14th century, the Englishman William of Baskerville, distinguished by remarkable insight, sends the reader with his name to the story of the most famous detective feat of Sherlock Holmes, and his chronicler bears the name of Adson (a clear allusion to Watson in Conan Doyle), clearly orients the reader. Such is the role of references to narcotic drugs used by Sherlock Holmes of the 14th century to maintain intellectual activity.

Y. Lotman suggests that this is a medieval detective, and his hero is a former inquisitor (Latin inquisitor - investigator and researcher at the same time) - this is Sherlock Holmes in a Franciscan cassock, who is called upon to unravel a cunning crime.

However, in the novel by W. Eco, events do not develop at all according to the canons of a detective, and the former inquisitor, the Franciscan William of Baskerville, turns out to be a very strange Sherlock Holmes. The hopes placed on him by the abbot of the monastery and the readers do not come true in the most decisive way: he always comes too late.

Yu. Lotman writes: “In the end, the whole “detective” line of this strange detective story turns out to be completely obscured by other plots. The reader's interest switches to other events, and he begins to realize that he was simply fooled, that, having evoked in his memory the shadows of the hero of the "Baskerville Hound" and his faithful companion-chronicler, the author invited us to take part in one game, while he himself plays completely another. It is natural for the reader to try to figure out what kind of game is being played with him and what are the rules of this game. He himself finds himself in the position of a detective, but the traditional questions that always worry all Sherlock Holmes, Maigret and Poirot: who committed (commits) the murder (s) and why, are supplemented by a much more complex one: why and why the cunning semiotician from Milan, appearing in a triple mask: a Benedictine monk of a provincial German monastery of the 14th century, the famous historian of this order, Father J. Mabillon, and his mythical French translator, Abbé Vallee? As in the case of the detective, where clear parallels are given with the famous "Hound of the Baskervilles", so in the case of the historical novel, the primary source is indicated - "The Betrothed" by Manzoni. But even here there is only the illusion of a historical novel. No deployed love affair, which is reduced to one episode. All the action takes place inside the same limited space - the monastery. A significant part of the text - reflections and conclusions. This is not the structure of a historical novel. According to Lotman, the author, as it were, opens two doors for the reader at once, leading in opposite directions. On one is written a detective story, on the other - a historical novel. Both doors, open to the reader, lead, it turns out, to a dead end. Before us is a model of a labyrinth. It is no coincidence that the image of the labyrinth is central in the novel. Postmodernism will be characterized by the concept of a rhizome, as a prototype of a symbolic labyrinth, without a clearly defined central direction.

The main element of this work will also be the text, which, according to the author, grows out of linguistic boundaries and becomes comprehensive. The text is the monastic life of the Middle Ages, it is history itself, it is frescoes on the walls of the temple, customs, mores. It is no coincidence that the whole intrigue is based on the search for the lost second part of Aristotle's Poetics. “For me, the text is limitless,” wrote the theorist of postmodernism J. Derrida. “It is an absolute totality… There is nothing outside the text.” The position of postmodernist theorists, to whom U. Eco himself belongs, that history and society are what can be “read” as a text, has led to the perception of human culture as a single “intertext”, which serves as a pretext for any newly emerging text. That is why there are so many different reminiscences in the novel The Name of the Rose, taken not only from the classic detective story and historical novel, but also from medieval and ancient philosophy, modern semiotics. So, according to R. Barth, “every text is an intertext; other texts are present in it on different levels in more or less indicated forms. Through the prism of intertext, the world appears as a huge text in which everything has already been said, and the new is possible only according to the principle of a kaleidoscope: the mixing of certain elements gives new combinations.

In the novel "The Name of the Rose" they talk a lot about laughter, and this is not accidental. Most likely, this is not so much laughter as irony, which in postmodernism is called pastiche, embodying the so-called negative pathos. So, the heroes of the novel talk a lot about laughter and its place in human culture about whether Christ laughed. The lost part of Aristotle's Poetics itself is also devoted to laughter.

The novel is accompanied by Marginal Notes of The Name of the Rose, in which the author brilliantly talks about the process of creating his novel.

The work ends with a Latin phrase, which translates as follows: “Rose with the same name - we will continue with our names.” As the author himself notes, the quote raised many questions, therefore “Marginal Notes” of “The Name of the Rose” begin with an “explanation” of the meaning of the title.

At first, writes W. Eco, he wanted to call the book "The Abbey of Crimes", but such a title set readers on a detective story and would confuse those who are only interested in intrigue. The title “The Name of the Rose”, notes U. Eco, suited him, “because the rose, as it were, is a symbolic figure so full of meanings that it has almost no meaning ... The name, as intended, disorients the reader ... The name should confuse thoughts, and not discipline them." Thus, the writer emphasizes that the text lives its own life, often independent of it. Hence new, different readings, interpretations, to which the title of the novel should set. And it is no coincidence that the author placed this Latin quotation from a work of the 12th century at the end of the text so that the reader would make various assumptions, thoughts and compare, bewildered and argue.

C. The problems of the novel "Foucault's Pendulum"

This work is devoted to the problems of cybernetics, the analysis of the predecessor of this modern science - the medieval teachings of Kabbalah, the problems of the information society, as well as the history of the world behind the scenes. This is a strange narrative that combines the stylistic features of a scientific treatise and artistic prose.

"Foucault's pendulum" can be attributed to the so-called modern scientific discourse, to a vivid embodiment of the crisis of rationality, when scientific thought deliberately refuses the language of strict logic, the language of concepts and terms and seeks to express itself in irrational images and with the help of a fascinating plot.

The novel is a fascinating story of the birth and change of religious orders in Europe, which radically influenced all the ideas, values ​​and creations of human hands - from Mozart and Einstein to Napoleon, the Russian tsarist secret police, Stalin and Hitler, from instruments of torture to the Eiffel Tower and IBM computers .

It is no coincidence that the novel is built around the main character - Foucault's pendulum. It embodies, on the one hand, the center of the Universe, and on the other, a great illusion, since there is no center at all. According to the postmodern paradigm, there are no central concepts, logics, principles and values ​​in the world. The world is only chaos, and the pendulum in this sense is the absolute equivalent of the modern model of a chaotic world. With each stroke, the author clearly shows the next degree of the turn of the world, where we all - neo-Kabbalists and postmodernists, beggars and bankers, artists and officials, saints and sinners - revolve in our successes and particulars.

1. Foreign literature. XX century: textbook. for stud. / ed. N. P. Mikhalskaya [and others]; under total ed. N. P. Mikhalskaya. - M.: Bustard, 2003. - S. 388-397.

2. Kostyukovich, E. Eco's orbits / E. Kostyukovich // The name of the rose / U. Eco. - M., 1998. - S. 654-649.

3. Lotman, D. Exit from the labyrinth / Y. Lotman // The name of the rose / W. Eco. - M.: book chamber, 1989. - S. 467-481.

4. Potapova, Z. M. Italian novel today / Z. M. Potapova. - M., 1977.

5. Eco, U. Notes on the margins "The name of the rose" / U. Eco // The name of the rose / U. Eco. - M.: Book Chamber, 1989. - 496 p.

The gloomy atmosphere of the fascist dictatorship was heavily reflected in the Italian literature of the period under review. The influence of fascism manifested itself not only among its direct troubadours and apologists, but also among some writers who were opposed to fascism.

Gabriel D'Annunzio, one of the most significant Italian writers and poets, who became widely known back in late XIX in.

After he became a fascist, his creativity was impoverished. Every year he wrote less and less. The last works of D'Annunzio are mostly pompous speeches and crackling publicistic speeches.

The evolution of another major Italian writer, the novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, was different. Having joined the so-called verismo (an Italian variety of naturalism) at an early stage of his work, from the beginning of the 20s he completely broke with this trend and began to develop a new style he created, called "humorism".

Pirandello recognizes insufficient naturalistic reproduction of reality, believes that it cannot be known by direct, "ordinary" means. The world is not the same and the person is not the same as they appear to us; we are present at a tragicomic spectacle, the true meaning of which can be understood only by tearing off their habitual masks from its participants.

Therefore, Pirandello endows his heroes with a kind of double life: they live in the world of everyday life, gray and everyday, and in the world of imagination, ghostly and beautiful. The boundaries between the real and the irrational are blurred, everyday reality appears as something illogical and incomprehensible, and the world of dreams and fiction takes on quite real outlines.

This theme of "face and mask", the real world and the imaginary world was developed by the writer in a number of his works of various genres - in stories from the last volumes of the extensive cycle "Novels in a Year", in the novel "One, Not One, One Hundred Thousand" and especially in dramaturgy. .

The paradoxical form served in them to reveal the true face of the character, and sometimes a very sharp social content, to expose bourgeois morality.

In the future, in the oppressive atmosphere of the fascist dictatorship, Pirandello's work acquires the features of reconciliation with surrounding reality. In his late plays(“The New Colony”, “The Legend of the Changeling Son”) social issues almost completely disappear, and the characters turn into abstract symbols.

The anti-fascist camp in Italy was not as wide and monolithic as in the German literary environment. The most significant anti-fascist writer, Giovanni Germanetto, who emigrated from the country after the seizure of power by Mussolini, created a number of significant works.

The best of them (above all, his story The Barber's Notes) are dedicated to the Italian working class and its liberation struggle. Important in the work of Germanetto was the image of the ideological formation and growth of a revolutionary fighter.

The latent protest against fascism was reflected in the works of Alberto Moravia, Francesco Iovine, Cesare Pavese and some other young writers. They were united by an interest in the fate of the intelligentsia in capitalist society, in its ideological quest.

The impoverishment and squalor of the privileged class are depicted in Moravia's novel The Indifferent; the baseness of the interests of the bourgeois environment - in Jovine's book "The Fickle Man"; the dissatisfaction of the intelligentsia is in Pavese's book Hard Work.

All these works were written with great mastery of psychoanalysis and were met with very hostile official criticism, for they tore the mask off the imaginary prosperity that allegedly reigned in the fascist "generation of new Romans."

However, in addition to the spirit of opposition in the work of these writers, there were also moods of pessimism and skepticism, uncertainty about the possibility of fighting evil.

Italian literature occupies an important place in the culture of Europe. This happened despite the fact that the Italian language itself acquired literary outlines quite late, around the 1250s. This was due to the strong influence of Latin in Italy, where it was most widely used. Schools, which were predominantly secular in nature, taught Latin everywhere. Only when it was possible to get rid of this influence did authentic literature begin to take shape.

Renaissance

The first famous works of Italian literature date back to the Renaissance. When the arts flourish all over Italy, literature struggles to keep up. Several world famous names belong to this period at once - Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri. At that time, the Italian French literature The Renaissance sets the tone for all of Europe. And this is not surprising.

Dante is rightfully considered the founder of the Italian literary language. He lived and worked at the turn of the XIII-XIV centuries. His most famous work was The Divine Comedy, which gave a full analysis of late medieval culture.

In Italian literature, Dante remained a poet and thinker who was constantly looking for something fundamentally new and different from everyday life. He had a muse that he worshiped named Beatrice. This love, in the end, received a mysterious and even some kind of mystical meaning. After all, he filled each of his works with it. The idealized image of this woman is one of the key in the works of Dante.

Fame came to him after the release of the story "New Life", which told about love, which renewed the main character, forcing him to take a different look at everything around. It was composed of canzones, sonnets and prose stories.

Dante also devoted much time to political treatises. But his main work is still The Divine Comedy. This is a vision of the afterlife, a very popular genre in Italian literature at that time. The poem is an allegorical building in which a dense forest, where main character, represents human sins and delusions, and the strongest passions are pride, voluptuousness and self-interest.

Character " Divine Comedy"together with the guide goes on a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.

The most complete picture of the writers and works of this country can be compiled from the Mokulsky encyclopedia. Italian literature on the basis of this study appears in all its glory.

One of the most famous lyric poets in Italy is Francesco Petrarch. He lived in the XIV century, was a prominent representative of the generation of humanists. It is interesting that he wrote not only in Italian but also in Latin. Moreover, he gained world fame precisely thanks to Italian poetry, which he treated with a certain amount of disdain during his lifetime.

In these works, he regularly refers to his beloved named Laura. The reader from Petrarch's sonnets will learn that they first met in the church in 1327, and exactly 21 years later she was gone. Even after that, Petrarch continued to sing it for ten years.

In addition to poems dedicated to love for Laura, these Italian cycles contain works of a religious and political nature. Italian literature of the Renaissance is perceived by many through the prism of Petrarch's poetry.

One more bright representative period Italian Renaissance in literature - Giovanni Boccaccio. He had a significant impact on the development of European culture with their works. Boccaccio wrote a large number of poems based on subjects from ancient mythology, actively used the genre of psychological story in his work.

His main work was the collection of short stories "The Decameron", one of the most striking works of Italian literature of the Renaissance. The short stories in this book, as critics note, are imbued with humanistic ideas, the spirit of free thought, humor and cheerfulness, reflect the full palette of Italian society, contemporary to the author.

The Decameron is a collection of 100 stories told to each other by seven ladies and 13 men. During the plague that has swept the country, they flee to a remote estate in the countryside, where they expect to wait out the epidemic.

All stories are presented in an easy and elegant language, the narrative breathes diversity and life's truth. Boccaccio uses a large number of artistic techniques in these short stories, depicting people of all kinds of characters, ages and conditions.

The love that Boccaccio paints is fundamentally different from the ideas about romantic relationship with Petrarch and Dante. Giovanni has a burning passion that borders on the erotic, rejecting established family values. The literature of the Italian Renaissance is largely based on the Decameron.

The writers of other states also played a great influence. Italian and French literature of the Renaissance developed very quickly and dynamically, also represented by such names as Pierre de Ronsard and many others.

17th century

The next important stage is the development of Italian literature of the 17th century. At that time, there were two schools in the country - pindarists and seascapes. The Marinists are led by Giambattista Marino. His most famous work is the poem "Adonis".

The second school of literature in Italian was founded by Gabriello Chiabrera. He was a very prolific author, from whose pen came a large number of pastoral plays, epic poems and odes. In the same row, it is necessary to mention the poet Vincenzo Filicaia.

Interestingly, the fundamental difference between these schools lies in the technical tricks and issues related to the form of the work.

At about the same time, a circle appears in Naples, from which emerges the Arcadian Academy, to which many famous poets and satirists of that period.

In the 18th century, after a period of a certain stagnation, a bright representative of Italian classical literature was born. He is a playwright and librettist. He has more than 250 plays to his credit.

World fame Goldoni brings comedy "Servant of two masters", which is still included in the repertoire of many theaters around the world. The events of this work unfold in Venice. The protagonist is Truffaldino, a rogue and deceiver who managed to escape from the poor town of Bergamo to rich and successful Venice. There he is hired as a servant to Signor Rasponi, who is in fact a girl in disguise Beatrice. In the guise of her dead brother, she seeks to find her lover, who by mistake and because of injustice is accused of murder and forced to flee Venice.

Truffaldino, who wants to earn as much as possible, serves two masters at the same time, and at first he successfully succeeds.

Giacomo Leopardi

In the 19th century, Italian fiction continues to develop, but there are no big names like Dante or Goldoni. We can note the romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi.

His poems were very lyrical, although he left very little behind him - several dozen poems. For the first time they saw the light in 1831 under the single title "Songs". These poems were completely imbued with pessimism, which colored the whole life of the author himself.

Leopardi has not only poetic, but also prose works. For example, "Moral Essays". This is the name of his philosophical essay, and he also formulates his worldview in the "Diary of Reflections".

All his life he was in search and invariably experienced disappointment. He claimed that he needed love, desire, fire and life, but on all positions he was wrecked. For most of his life, the poet was disabled, so he could not fully cooperate with foreign universities, although they regularly offered it. He was also oppressed by the idea that Christianity is just an illusion. And since Leopardi was by nature a mystical nature, he often found himself in front of a painful void.

In poetry, he portrayed a sense of true and natural beauty, being an adherent of the ideas of Rousseau.

Leopardi was often called the incarnate poet of world sorrow.

Raffaello Giovagnoli

The classics of Italian literature began to take shape towards the end of the 19th century. The Italian historian and novelist writes a tribute to the gladiator of the same name, who leads the slave uprising that took place in Ancient Rome. It is noteworthy that this character is very real.

In addition, Giovagnoli's narrative itself, in addition to historical truth and facts, is woven with lyrical plots that did not really exist. For example, in an Italian writer, Spartak falls in love with the patrician Valeria, who treats him favorably.

At the same time, a courtesan from Greece, Eutibida, is in love with Spartacus himself, whose love the protagonist categorically rejects. As a result, it is the offended Eutibida who plays one of the decisive roles in the defeat of the army of Spartacus and in his further death.

The ending is very believable. The uprising of the slaves was indeed brutally suppressed, and Spartacus was killed.

Writers from the south of the country have made a great contribution to the development of Italian children's literature. For example, journalist Carlo Collodi writes the famous fairy tale "The Adventures of Pinocchio. The Story of a Wooden Doll". In Russia, of course, it is better known in the interpretation of Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who wrote The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Pinocchio.

Collodi himself, originally from Florence, when the war of independence was waged in Italy (1848 and 1860), volunteered to fight in the army of Tuscany.

In Italian literature of the 20th century, it stands out clearly from the rest. This is an Italian playwright and writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. Modern Italian literature in the person of Pirandello is a fascinating and inventive narrative, with the help of which the author simultaneously revives stage and drama.

The absurd has a great influence on the author. This production demonstrates the contradictions that arise between everyday life and art, this example demonstrates the social tragedy of people who are powerless to resist the masks imposed on them by society. They themselves only demand from the author that he write a play for them.

The play is divided into real and fantastic plan. In the first, the characters of a play that has not yet been written act, and already in the second, the viewer learns about the tragedy that befalls them.

Pirandello entered his literary activity as the author of the collection Joyful Pain, which was popular in 1889. In many of his early poems, the desire to demonstrate to others his inner world is combined, as well as a spiritual rebellion that opposes the hopelessness of the surrounding life. In 1894, the writer released a collection of short stories "Love without Love", and then a collection of "Novels for a Year", in which he sought to combine a demonstration of the inner world of a small person with his spiritual inner rebellion against a hopeless life. Some of the works as a result became the basis for several plays by Pirandello.

The writer entered the literature as an author who tells about the life of small towns and villages in Sicily, depicting the social strata of the people living there. For example, in the famous short stories "Blessing" and "Happy" he ridicules the representatives of the clergy, who hide their greed behind ostentatious mercy.

In some of his works, he deliberately departs from Italian traditionalism. So, in the short story "The Black Shawl" focuses on psychological portrait and the actions of the main character, who is an old maid who decided to arrange her life, regardless of the condemnation of others. At the same time, the author, at times, harshly criticizes the social order, when people are ready to do anything for the sake of profit. Such criticism public institutions are exposed in the short story "Tight tailcoat", in which the professor is invited to the wedding of his student. He becomes a witness of how the girl's future personal life is almost destroyed due to social prejudices.

A similar rebellion is described in the work "Train Whistle". At the center of the story is an accountant who feels dissatisfaction with his life under the influence of a momentary impulse. Dreaming of travels and wanderings, he understands how unimportant the life around him is, he is carried away to illusory world in which he finally loses his mind.

Appear in the work of Pirandello and political motives. Thus, in the short stories "The Fool" and "His Majesty" subtle political intrigues are demonstrated, while showing how petty they often are.

Often the object of criticism is social contradictions. In the short story "Fan" the main character is a poor peasant woman who was abandoned by a loved one, and the mistress simply robbed. She reflects that suicide is the only way to solve all her problems.

At the same time, Pirandello remains a humanist, giving the main place in his work to the reality of human feelings. The short story "Everything is like that of decent people" tells how the hero conquers his beloved with his selfless love forgiving even the betrayal she committed.

Pirandello himself often prefers to delve into the psychology of his characters, criticizing social reality and using such a technique as the grotesque. The characters are portrayed with social masks, which they must throw off in the course of the action. For example, in the short story "Some Commitments", the main character is cheated on by his wife. Her lover is an official from the municipality, to whom he comes to complain about his wife's infidelity. And when he finds out the whole truth, he not only forgives his wife, but also helps her lover. In fact, as the reader understands, he was never jealous of his wife, only putting on the social mask of an offended and deceived husband. The lover also wore a mask, but already a respectable official.

Pirandello uses the grotesque very unobtrusively in his works. For example, in the short story "In Silence" reveals the tragedy of a young man who knows all the cruelty of the world, which leads him to a sad and even tragic ending. He is forced to commit suicide and kill his younger brother.

In total, Pirandello wrote six novels during his literary career. In Les Misérables, he criticizes social prejudice and society, depicting a woman who herself is trying to become an object of criticism from others.

And in his most famous novel, The Late Mattia Pascal, he demonstrates the emerging contradiction between the true face of a person living in modern society and his social mask. His hero decides to start life with clean slate, arranging everything so that others consider him dead. But as a result, he only takes on a new shell, realizing that life outside of society is impossible. He begins to simply be torn between himself real and fictional, which symbolizes the gap between reality and human perception.

Italian literature of the 21st century is presented famous writer, our contemporary Niccolò Ammaniti. He was born in Rome, studied at the Faculty of Biology, but never graduated. They say that his graduate work formed the basis of his first novel, which was called "Gills". The novel was published in 1994. It tells about a boy from Rome who is diagnosed with a tumor. Almost against his will, he finds himself in India, where he constantly finds himself in all sorts of, often unpleasant situations. In 1999, the novel was filmed, but the film was not very successful.

In 1996, a collection of the writer's stories under the general title "Dirt" was published, among which were such well-known works as " Last year of humanity", "To live and die in Prenestine". Based on the story "There will be no holiday", a film was also made, in which the main role was played by Monica Bellucci. In general, many of Ammaniti's works have been repeatedly filmed.

In 1999, a modern Italian writer released another of his novels, "I'll pick you up and take you away." Its actions take place in a fictional city located in central Italy. But real fame comes to him in 2001. Thundered his novel "I'm not afraid." Two years later, director Gabriele Salvatores filmed it.

The events of this work unfold in the 70s of the XX century. In a remote Italian province lives 10-year-old Michele, who spends all summer playing games with friends.

One day they find themselves near an abandoned house, where there is a mysterious pit, covered with a lid on top. Without telling anyone about her, the next day, Michele returns to his find, finding a boy sitting on a chain there. He supplies the mysterious prisoner with bread and water. The children get to know each other. It turns out that the boy's name is Filippo, he was kidnapped for a ransom. Michele finds out that the crime was organized by a group of adults, including his own father.

Repeatedly, Ammaniti captivates readers with such exciting stories, illustrating what modern Italian literature can be like. He writes not only books, but also scripts. So, in 2004, the film "Vanity Serum" was released, based on his story. In 2006, critics reacted inconsistently to his new novel As God Commands. But at the same time, the work receives the approval of the reader community and even the Strega Award. In 2008, the film of the same name is released, which is again directed by Salvatores.

In 2010, Ammaniti wrote the novel "Me and You", which Bernardo Bertolucci is already bringing to life on the screen. Moreover, the maestro returns to filming a movie after a 7-year break, becoming interested in the plot of Ammaniti.

Among his latest works, it is necessary to highlight the popular collection of short stories "A Delicate Moment" and the novel "Anna", which became the seventh in his creative biography.

Italy's participation in the First World War on the side of the Entente intensified the already sharp contradictions in a country with a backward socio-economic structure, age-old unresolved problems and poverty, which was Italy at the end of the 19th century. This stimulates the revolutionary movement, the prestige of the socialist party. In 1921, the Communist Party was formed in Italy. However, a year later Mussolini came to power and established a fascist dictatorial regime in the country, which entered the history of Italy under the name "Black Twenty". Culture was subordinated to politics and totalitarianism, which led to the polarization of the intelligentsia, most of which did not accept fascism. During years captivity created "Prison Notebooks" Antonio Gramsci(1891-1937), which developed the foundations of people's democratic culture and Marxist aesthetics.

Many writers who did not want to sing of fascism hid behind the concepts of "pure art", the so-called "artistic prose" and the current "hermeticism" (Italian: poesia ermetica), which developed in the late twenties. "Hermetics" focused on chamber and subjective experiences, encrypted poetics. Their works are simple in form. They sought, first of all, to express feelings, not thoughts, to convey hidden world mental states. Adjoined to the "sealants" Eugenio MONTALE(1896-1981) - Nobel laureate in 1975, Giuseppe UNGARETTI(1888-1970), Umberto SABA(1883-1957).

Encrypted associative images are typical for "Fun of the Shipwrecked" (1932) and "Sense of Time" (1933) Ungaretti, "Accidents" (1939) Montale. Ungaretti own lines that convey the "hermetic feeling of the world":

But my cries hurt like lightning The hoarse bell of heaven And collapse in horror. (Translated by E. Solonovich)

The poetry of Umberto Saba, the only one of the great artists who escaped avant-garde searches, belongs to the classical national tradition. He is faithful to reality, to the happy dimensions of what he experienced in childhood. The bright, cloudless verse of the poet is a kind of protection of a person, joy and beauty from the "abyss" of despair:

Words in which the human heart was once reflected - naked and surprised. I would like to find a corner in the world for me, a fertile oasis, where I could cleanse you from all-blinding lies with tears. And there and then would melt, like snow in the sun, the sadness that is forever alive in memory. (Translated by E. Solonovich)

At the origins of mature Italian lyrics - "Orphic Songs" published in 1914 Dino CAMPANS(1885-1932), the only collection of the poet, called "Italian Rimbaud" for his vagrancy and chaotic life.

Poet Salvatore QUASIMODO(1901-1968), Nobel Prize winner in 1959, entered poetry in the thirties, following both Hermeticism and Hellenistic poetry, which he translated (collections "Water and Earth", "Erato and Apollo"). A sharp turning point was recorded by his poems from the period of the Resistance, which reflected the new pathos of the partisan struggle ("And suddenly the evening came", 1942; "Life is not a dream", 1949). Quasimodo's poems are concise and expressive:

The night is over, and the moon dissolves into azure, sailing away beyond the canals. September is tenacious here on the flat land, and its autumn meadows are green, like southern spring valleys. I left my comrades and buried my heart in the old wall to remember you alone. Oh, how farther are you than the moon, now that, in anticipation of dawn, hooves clattered along the pavement! (Translated by L. Martynov)

The culture of the beginning of the century overcomes the crisis of moral, spiritual and aesthetic values. On the ruins of the romantic ideals of the Risorgimento and the collapse of the positivist foundations, idealistic philosophy, intuitionism, and agnosticism gain popularity. The assimilation of Nietzsche's ideas on Italian soil has its own specifics. Nationalist ideology penetrates the culture, colors the Italian avant-garde, especially Futurism. Of great importance in the reorientation of the entire Italian culture was the aesthetic concept of Benedetto CROCE (1866-1952). Based on the postulate "art is pure intuition", it was located between intuitionism and positivism.

Italian decadence, replaced by avant-garde, is developing quite intensively, as if trying to catch up with other European countries. Contradictory tendencies are intertwined in it: "the poetry of blood and iron" as a reaction to the 20th century and the desire to hide from the chaos of the century and the thunder of guns in a quiet provincial life. The main myths and masks of decadence in Italy were created by Gabriele D "ANNUZIO (1863-1938), a poet, prose writer, playwright. His short stories, which appeared at the end of the century and were published later under the general title "Pescari Novels" (1902), are characterized by eclecticism; they one can recognize the experience of verism and the naturalism of Zola, the psychological analysis of Maupassant and the moral-psychological collisions of Dostoevsky; there is a lot of cruel fanaticism in them and a strong craving for refined feelings.

In D'Annunzio's novels "The Triumph of Death" (1894) and "The Flame" (1900), the myth of the superman and the conqueror, which had previously found a place in his poetry collections ("Roman Elegies", 1892), is accentuated. Fine examples of lyrics contain the best poetic creation of the writer - cycle "Songs of Praise to Heaven, Sea, Earth, Heroes" (1903-1912), consisting of five books. latest novel D "Annunzio, written before the war," Maybe - yes, maybe - no "(1910), rather weak artistically, but significant for understanding the evolution of the writer, expressed delight in technology and speed. From the "superman", reveling in torpedo attack, not far from the official poet of fascism, to whom the Mussolini government granted the title of prince in 1924, and to the idol of nationalist youth.